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III: DOES THE WORKING CLASS EXIST?

BURAWOY MEETS BOURDIEU

Michael Burawoy

I am starting to wonder more and more whether todays social structures arent yesterdays

symbolic structures and whether for instance class as it is observed is not to some extent the

product of the theoretical effects of Marxs work.

Pierre Bourdieu, Fieldwork in Philosophy, p.18

s the idea of the working class a projection, with real consequences, of the political

and intellectual imagination? Once defined as a class, subject to exploitation, can

workers comprehend the conditions of their own subjugation? What role can intellectuals

play in bringing about such a self-understanding? On these matters, which go straight to

the heart of Marxism, Marx himself was ambiguous. Undoubtedly Marx did believe that

the working class existed independently of intellectuals, and that through class struggle

they would dissolve any false consciousness, and liberate themselves and the rest of

humanity. At the same Marxs writing are littered with doubts about the capacity of the

working class to see through the mystification produced by capitalism whether this be

the hiding of exploitation in the sphere of production, commodity fetishism in the sphere

of exchange, or, moving further afield, the subjection of the working class to the power of

ideology.

I

In this indeterminacy of the consciousness of the working class the role of

intellectuals remains unclear. On the one hand, The Communist Manifesto spoke


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famously of intellectuals joining the working class when they see the writing on the wall

and victory of the proletariat is in sight. On the other hand, intellectuals can wage war on

behalf of the working class against intellectuals of the ruling class. After all, what were

Marx and Engels, themselves intellectuals, doing when they wrote and disseminatedThe

Communist Manifesto and other brilliant treatises and polemics. Although their works

have had a genuine theory effect, as Bourdieu calls it, they never seriously reflected on

what they were up to, what that theory effect might be.

With regard to the theory of intellectuals and class domination there are indeed

two roads from Marx: on the one side Gramscis theory of hegemony as the organization

of a socially, politically and economically contingent consent that can be forged or

challenged by intellectuals, and on the other side Bourdieus theory of symbolic violence

based on the inculcation of a virtually unalterable misrecognition that leaves intellectuals

floundering in some public sphere. In the former, (organic) intellectuals elaborate the

good sense of workers whereas in the latter there is no good sense to enlarge and the best

(traditional) intellectuals can do is to demystify class domination but with no obvious

audience except other intellectuals. The result is two critical perspectives on social

science the one favoring its development through collaboration with the dominated

within the framework of a political party, and the other defending an uncontaminated

space -- the freedom and autonomy of the academy -- from which to launch assaults on

the ruling ideology. In Lecture II I tried to show how these two perspectives can be seen

as complementary, we need both traditional and organic intellectuals. In this lecture I

seek to adjudicate between the two on the basis of my own research on the working class


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in the United States and Hungary. In the final analysis Bourdieu offers little empirical

evidence for his claim about the depth of the domination exercised over the dominated

and I shall defend a more situationally and institutionally produced consent.

Gramsci vs. Bourdieu

While Lenin provided the inspiration, it was Gramsci who first developed a

Marxist theory of intellectuals based on the idea that the working class possesses a good

sense a revolutionary imagination at the heart of its common sense. It only

remained for Marxist intellectuals to elaborate that good sense. In the final analysis

Gramsci believes that the common sense of workers could not be incompatible with

Marxism:

At this point, a fundamental question is raised: can modern theory [Marxism] be in opposition to

the spontaneous feelings of the masses? (spontaneous in the sense that they are not the result

of any systematic educational activity on the part of an already conscious leading group, but have

been formed through everyday experience illuminated by common sense, i.e. by the traditional

popular conception of the worldwhat is unimaginatively called instinct, although it too is in

fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition.) It cannot be in opposition to them. Between

the two there is a quantitative difference of degree, not one of quality. A reciprocal reduction

so to speak, a passage from one to the other and vice versa, must be possible Neglecting, or

worse still despising, so-called spontaneous movement, i.e. failing to give them a conscious

leadership or to raise them to a higher plane by inserting them into politics, may often have

extremely serious consequences (PN, pp.198-9).

Here organic intellectuals elaborate the good sense through dialogue with the working

class, and at the same time repudiate the ruling ideologies perpetrated by traditional

intellectuals. Aided and abetted by structural conditions, specifically organic crises, the


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organic intellectual breaks the consent to bourgeois domination, turning it into support

for an alternative, socialist hegemony.

By contrast, Bourdieu regards this Marxist tradition that confuses class on

paper with class in action -- epitomized by the organic intellectual who makes that

illusory connection -- as dangerously deluded, and an obstacle to the advance of science.

The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so

completely realized its potential in the social world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of

the social world which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect that it, more than any

other, has created is doubtless, today, the most powerful obstacle to the progress of adequate

theory of the social world to which it has, in times gone by, more than any other contributed.

(Language and Symbolic Power, p.251)

Marxism has exerted a powerful influence (theory effect) on the world but it has not

understood how it has accomplished this, namely by working class representatives

constituting an imaginary conflation of class on paper and class in reality, expressed

in the mythology of the organic intellectual. Inured to the coercion of material

necessity, the working class does not have the transformative potential attributed to it.

Such a false attribution makes for bad science. Without good sense to elaborate, close

encounters between the working class and intellectuals, either contaminates the

intellectuals worldview or subjects workers to the will of intellectuals. Either way there

is no basis for dialogue, and so the intellectual qua scientist must stand aloof from the

dominated class, making an epistemological break with its practical (common) sense a

practical sense that blinds it to the very conditions of its own subjugation.


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Thus, we have two visions of the engaged intellectual: Bourdieus traditional

intellectual, unmasking symbolic violence exercised over the working class, but an

unmasking that takes place at a distance from the working class, and Gramscis organic

intellectual working out the theory of hegemony and consent in close connection with the

working class. How do my own studies of the working class accord with these two

theories? What I will do here is reconstruct my own ethnographies of working class

consciousness. I present first the original interpretation of the capitalist workplace,

second how my subsequent reading of Bourdieu altered that interpretation, third how the

study of the state socialist workplace and its collapse provides a critique of the

Bourdieuian perspective, and finally, how the postsocialist transition and the building of

something new, can be read as a vindication of Bourdieu.

Take I: Manufacturing Consent

Gramscis originality lay in his periodization of capitalism not on the basis of its

economy but on the basis of its superstructures, in particular the ascendancy of the state-

civil society nexus that absorbed challenges to capitalism. The turn to superstructure

reflected the need to contain the parasitic residue of pre-capitalist European social

formations. InAmerican and Fordism, however,he wrote that such residues did not exist

in the United States and so hegemony was here born in the factory, allowing the forces

of production to expand much more rapidly than elsewhere.

Manufacturing Consent(not to be confused with Chomskys later and much more

famous book)endeavored to elaborate what it might mean to say that in the US


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hegemony is born in the factory. The book was based on participant observation in a

South Chicago factory where I was a machine operator for 10 months, from July 1974 to

May 1975. I was a wage laborer like everyone else, although it was apparent that I was

from a very different background than they, not least because of my English accent which

many of my co-workers founds impenetrable. I made no secret of my purpose for being

there, namely to gather the material for my dissertation.

Influenced by the French structuralist Marxism of the 1970s appropriations

(represented as rejections) of Gramsci, I argued that theories of the state developed by

Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci could be applied to the internal workings of the

factory. An internal state (what I would also call the political and ideological apparatuses

of production) constituted workers as industrial citizens, individuals with rights and

obligations, recognized in grievance machinery and in the details of the labor contract.

Here you could see in miniature Poulantzass national popular state. At the same time the

internal state oversaw the concrete coordination of the interests of capital and labor

through collective bargaining. The material basis of hegemony could be found directly in

the economic concessions granted by capital to labor, concessions, as Gramsci says, that

do not touch the essential. Finally, following Poulantzas again, I saw enterprise

management as a power bloc, made up of different divisions, under the hegemony of

manufacturing.

As well as an internal state there was also an internal labor marketthat reinforced

the atomizing effects of the internal state. It gave workers the opportunity to bid on other


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jobs within the factory, allocated on the basis of seniority and experience, and giving

workers power and leverage against management. If workers did not like their job or their

supervisor they could bid on an alternative job in their department. Workers who

somehow made themselves indispensable to their foremen could wield considerable

power. Like the internal state, the internal labor market constituted workers as

individuals and, through rewards based on seniority, tied their interest to capital. That is

to say workers not only had an interest in capital accumulation, even at their own

expense, but also in staying with the same firm because moving to another one would put

them at the bottom of the seniority ladder.

The internal state and internal labor market were the conditions for a third source

of consent, the constitution ofwork as a game, in my case the game of making out,

whose rules were understood and acknowledged by operators, auxiliary workers and shop

floor supervisors alike. It was a piecework game and the goal was to make out, i.e.

make an acceptable percentage output, one that was not higher than 140% and not lower

than 125%. The details need not detain us here, suffice to say that constituting work as a

game is common in many workplaces because it counters ennui and arduousness, it

makes time pass quickly, enabling workers to endure otherwise meaningless work. There

were good psychological reasons to participate in such a game, but just as important the

social order pressured everyone into playing the same game with more or less the same

rules. We continually evaluated each other as to how well we were playing the game. It

was difficult to opt out without also being ostracized.


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Playing the game had two important consequences. First, the game certainly

limited output through goldbricking (taking it easy on difficult piece rates) and quota

restriction (limiting output to 140% so as to avoid rate increases), but it also got operators

to work much harder than they otherwise might. It was a game that favored the

application of effort that advanced profits for management, and with only small monetary

concessions. Second, it not only contributed to profit but also to hegemony. The very act

of playing the game simultaneously produced consent to its rules. You cant be serious

about playing a game, and this was a very serious game, if, at the same time, you

question its rules and goals. Making out not only produced consent to the rules of the

game, it also concealed the conditions of its existence, the relations of production

between capital and labor.1

In the language I used at the time the effect of organizing

work as a game simultaneously secured and obscured surplus appropriation.

If the organization of work as a game was the third prong of hegemony, it was

effective in generating consent only because it was separated from the armor of coercion

a separation that was made possible by the constraints imposed on management by the

internal labor market and internal state. This three pronged hegemony was a distinctive

feature of advanced capitalism where management could no longer hire and fire at will.

No longer able to rely on the arbitrary rule of a despotic regime of production,

management had topersuade workers to deliver surplus, that is management had to

manufacture consent. Thus, the internal state and the internal labor market were the

apparatuses of hegemony, constituting workers as individuals and coordinating their

1There is no shortage of studies that suggest the ubiquity of games. For some outstanding recent examples

see Ofer Sharones study of software engineers, Jeff Sallazs study of casino dealers, or Rachel Shermans

study of hotel workers.


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interests with those of management, applying force only under well defined and restricted

conditions. Facing a crisis, for example, management could not arbitrarily close down the

game down or violate its rules, at least, if it wanted to uphold its hegemony.

A game has to have sufficient uncertainty to draw in players but it also has to

provide players with sufficient control over outcomes. A despotic regime, in which

management can hire and fire at will, creates too much arbitrariness for a game to

produce consent. In short, the hegemonic regime creates a relatively autonomous arena of

work, with an appropriate balance of certainty and uncertainty, so that a game can be

constituted and consent produced. In a hegemonic regime the application of force

(ultimately being expelled from work), whether it occurs as a result of a workers

violation of rules or as a result of the demise of the enterprise, must itself be the object of

consent.

So far so good: the economic process of production, I argued, is simultaneously a

political process of reproduction of social relations with the help of the internal state and

internal labor market and an ideological process of producing an experience of those

relations, particularly through the game of making out. I had advanced Gramscis

analysis by taking his analysis of the state and civil society into the factory, applying it to

the micro-physics of power and, further, adding a new dimension to organizing consent

the idea of social structure as a game.2

2It was while working and teaching with Adam Przeworski (1973-1976) that I developed the idea of social

structure as a game. It was during this time that he was developing his Gramscian theory of electoral

politics in which party competition could be thought of as an absorbing game in which the struggle was


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Take II: Symbolic Domination and Hegemony in Advanced Capitalism

Thirty years later I read Bourdieus account of the two-fold truth of labor in

Pascalian Meditations where, to my astonishment, I found him making a similar

argument:

The objectification that was necessary to constitute wage labour in its objective truth has masked

the fact which, as Marx himself indicates, only becomes the objective truth in certain exceptional

labour situations: the investment in labour, and therefore miscognition of the objective truth of

labor as exploitation, which leads people to find an extrinsic profit in labor, irreducible to simple

monetary income, is part of the real conditions of the performance of labour, and of exploitation.

(Pascalian Meditations, p.203)

What is Bourdieu saying? There is an objective truth of labor, which, following Marx, is

exploitation, the appropriation of surplus labor from the direct producer. This objective

truth, however, is not recognized as such. The distinctive feature of capitalism is that

exploitation is hidden, or as I put it obscured, to be revealed to workers only under

certain conditions. Under feudalism, by contrast, exploitation was transparent the

necessary labor of the serf to maintain himself and his family was separated in both time

and space from the surplus labor he produced for the lord. This clear distinction between

surplus labor and necessary labor becomes invisible under capitalism so that workers

appear to be paid for the entire time they labor for their employer whereas they are

actually paid for only a proportion of that labor. It is this experience of an absence not

known that is the basis of the subjective truth of labor.

over distribution of economic resources at the margin and eclipsed the fundamental inequality upon which

the game was based.


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Since surplus is invisible to all and its existence is only known by its effects,

namely profit realized in the market, employers never know whether their workers are

working hard enough to assure that profit. The problem for the employers is, thus, the

securing of surplus which they make the problem of workers either through despotic rule

or by coordinating the interests of workers with those of capital. In other words, the

securing of surplus through the organization of work depends upon the active agency of

labor wherein workers, as Bourdieu puts it, find an extrinsic profit in labor, which is to

say they play games, trying to appropriate freedoms that effectively contribute to and

further hide their exploitation. These freedoms won at the margins become central to their

production lives. Through these small gains and the relative satisfactions they bring, work

not only becomes palatable, but workers think they are outwitting management even

though they are unwittingly contributing to their own exploitation. As Bourdieu writes:

A whole process of investment leads workers to contribute to their own exploitation through their

effort to appropriate their work and their working conditions, which leads them to bind themselves

to their trade by means of the very freedoms (often minimal and almost always functional) that

are left to them Indeed, setting aside the extreme situations that are closest to forced labor, it can

be seen that the objective reality of wage labour, i.e. exploitation, is made possible partly by the

fact that the subjective reality of the labour does not coincide with its objective reality. (Men and

Machines, p.314-5, original inActes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales (1980) 32-33: 3-14)

If the couplet obscuring-securing surplus is none other than Bourdieus double

truth of labor, then how can I reconcile my own analysis with the theoretical perspective

of Gramsci upon which it was supposedly based. I seemed to be arguing that workers did

nothave a kernel of good sense within their common sense, they did not recognize the

conditions of their subordination and, therefore, while they were consenting to


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domination, at the same time, the organization of consent was based on the mystification

of exploitation (obscuring of surplus).

Whereas Gramscis idea of hegemony involves the naturalization of domination it

does not connote mystification and in this regard he is different from Marx and the

tradition of false consciousness that leads from Marx to Lukcs and beyond. Reading

Bourdieu makes it clear how different Gramsci is, not just from Bourdieu, but also from

Marx. It is interesting to ask why Gramsci might have overlooked the mystification of

capitalist exploitation, and instead basing his theory on a conscious consent? The most

general answer must be that he participated in revolutionary struggles at a time when

socialist transformation was on the political agenda, when capitalism did appear to be in

some deep organic crisis that would, in the end, give rise to fascism rather than socialism

all these factors suggest that support for capitalism was shallower than it appears to us

today in our postsocialist epoch.

A more specific answer has to do with his participation in the factory council

movement, and the occupation of the factories in Turin, 1919-1920. As skilled workers,

many of them craft workers, they felt the expropriation of skill and means of production

much more directly than the unskilled workers of today who take for granted the private

ownership of the means of production. Moreover, the occupation of their factories and

the collective self-organization of production through their councils meant that they

understood only too well the meaning of capitalist exploitation! For Gramsci, whose

experience of the working class was through the factory council movement, exploitation


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was hardly hidden and the working class really did exhibit a good sense within the

common sense. In Gramscis eyes the occupation failed because working class organs

trade unions and the socialist party were deeply wedded to capitalism, their interests

were coordinated with those of capital. For Gramsci this betrayal would have to be

rectified by the development of a Modern Prince the communist party -- that

understood and challenged capitalist hegemony. There was nothing hidden or

unconscious about the consent of parties and trade unions to capitalism.3

Bourdieu makes the opposite argument, namely that craft workers are not the

most likely but the least likely to see through their subjective experience to the objective

truth of exploitation: It can be assumed that the subjective truth is that much further

removed from the objective truth when the worker has greater control over his own

labour (PM: 203). Curiously, Bourdieu is at his most Marxist here in arguing that the

subjective truth converges on the objective truth as labor is deskilled. As barriers to labor

mobility are swept away workers lose any attachment to their work and can no longer

win for themselves the freedoms often minute and almost always functional (PM:

203) that bind them to work. Fearing such stripped and homogenized labor, modern

management tries to recreate those freedoms through participatory management:

while taking care to keep control of the instruments of profit, leaves workers the

freedom to organize their own work, thus helping to increase their well-being but also to

displace their interest from the external profit of labour (wage) to the intrinsic profit

(PM: 204-5), that is the profits from active control over work.

3 Indeed, Adam Przeworski has shown just how rational it is for socialist parties to fight for immediate

material gains in order to attract the votes necessary to gain and then to keep power.


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My argument is rather different. As long as there are internal labor markets and

internal states that create attachments to the employer as well as restrictions on employer

interventions, so workers will be able to carve out those workplace games that give them

the subjective sense of freedom. That is to say, hegemonic regimes may be the necessary

and sufficient condition for the mystification of exploitation, no matter how unskilled the

work may be. Indeed, the more labor is unskilled, the more important become the games

of work as a compensation for arduousness and estrangement.

Bourdieu, however, takes a different tack. Instead of exploring the institutional

conditions of mystification the political and ideological apparatuses of the enterprise

he turns to the dispositional conditions of symbolic domination.

Differences in dispositions, like differences in position (to which they are often linked), engender

real differences in perception and appreciation. Thus the recent changes in factory work, toward

the limit predicted by Marx, with the disappearance of job satisfaction, responsibility and

skill (and all the corresponding hierarchies), are appreciated and accepted very differently by

different groups of workers. Those whose roots are in the industrial working class, who possess

skills and relative privileges, are inclined to defend past gains, i.e., job satisfaction, skills and

hierarchies and therefore a form of established order; those who have nothing to lose because they

have no skills, who are in a sense a working-class embodiment of the populist chimera, such as

young people who have stayed at school longer than their elders, are more inclined to radicalize

their struggles and challenge the whole system: other, equally disadvantaged workers, such as

first-generation industrial workers, women, and especially immigrants, have a tolerance of

exploitation which seems to belong to another age. (Men and Machines, p.315)


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We are back with a functionalist tautology that those who have been socialized to

industrial work or who come from oppressed conditions accommodate to it, whereas

those who come from a different background, e.g. those who are downwardly mobile

from the middle classes are likely to radicalize their struggles and challenge the whole

system. InManufacturing ConsentI showed that externally derived dispositions made

no difference to the way people were inserted into production, or the intensity with which

they were drawn into the game of making out. Our experience on the shop floor was

more or less the same irrespective of our habitus. Thus, I was struck by my own

absorption into the game that occluded those famous relations of exploitation, which took

on a mythological character at work, even if they were central to my theoretical

conceptions.

So finally we come to my crucial difference with Bourdieu. In contrast to Gramsci

both of us recognize a fundamental gap between the objective and the subjective truth of

labor but for Bourdieu this is expressed as a misrecognition that comes from the

individuals habitus whereas for me it comes from mystification that derives from the

character of the institutions that organize and regulate work a mystification that

operates on all individuals independent of their inherited dispositions. Symbolic

domination rests on the bodily inculcation of social structure, and the formation of a deep

unconscious habitus whereas hegemony at work rests on individuals being inserted into

specific institutions that organize consent to domination, itself a condition for the

mystification of exploitation. Symbolic domination is seared into the individual psyche

whereas hegemony is an effect of social relations on the individuals who carry them.


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If this is the difference that separates us then examining consent/submission under

different institutional complexes should corroborate or disconfirm our different theories.

State socialism becomes a laboratory for the adjudication of our two theories. In the

theory of hegemony and mystification workers under state socialism should exhibit a

different consciousness from those under advanced capitalism whereas in the theory of

symbolic domination and misrecognition one would expect submission to be as deep if

not deeper under state socialism since there the coordination of the party state and its

institutions conspire to fashion a more deeply dominated habitus. So let me now turn to

my research in Hungarian factories.

Take III: The Fragile Hegemony of State Socialism

There were two reasons why I went in search of factory work in Hungary. The

first reason is that I missed the boat with the Polish Solidarity movement, 1980-1981,

which had absorbed my attention as the first society wide revolutionary movement of

industrial workers. General Jaruzelski beat me to the punch and so I did the next best

thing took up jobs in Hungary and asked why the Solidarity movement took place in

Poland rather than Hungary, and, more broadly, why in state socialism rather than

advanced capitalism. What were the possibilities for a democratic socialism to emerge

from state socialism? The second reason to draw me to the socialist world was the

specificity of my Chicago experience was it the product of capitalism or of

industrialism, broadly conceived? There is nothing in the writings of Bourdieu that


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suggest that misrecognition would be a feature of capitalism as opposed to state

socialism.

Between 1982 and 1989 I spent my summers and three sabbatical semesters

studying and working in Hungarian factories. I began in a champagne factory on a

collective farm and moved to a textile factory on an agricultural cooperative before

graduating to industrial work in a machine shop, very similar to the Chicago plant.

Finally, I would spend about 11 months in three separate stints working as a furnace man

in the Lenin steel works. Based on this research I concluded that the workplace regimes

of advanced capitalism and state socialism were indeed very different: if the former

produced consent, the latter produced dissent, the fundamental disposition that fired the

Polish Solidarity movement, but also collective mobilization in East Germany in 1953, in

Hungary in 1956, even in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The argument was a simple one: unlike capitalism, the appropriation of surplus

under state socialism is a transparent process, recognized as such by all. The party, the

trade union and management are all extensions of the state at the point of production,

extensions designed to maximize the appropriation of surplus for the fulfillment of plans.

Being transparent, exploitation is justified as being in the interests of all. Like any

process of legitimation, it is susceptible to being challenged on its own terms the party

state is vulnerable to the accusation that it is not delivering on its promises. Whereas

under capitalism ideology is unnecessary (even counterproductive) as a justification


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because exploitation is hidden, under state socialism ideology is a necessary feature of

state socialism but also its undoing.

Thus, the party state organizes rituals on the shop floor, what I called painting

socialism, that celebrate its virtues efficiency, justice, equality yet all around workers

see inefficiency, injustice and inequality. Workers turn the ruling ideology against the

rulers, making them accountable to their socialist propaganda. The state socialist

bureaucratic regime of production sows the seeds of dissent rather than consent. As

regards the organization of work itself the key games at work are about fulfilling

management quotas rather than individual quotas, so that the relations of exploitation are

not obscured but define the relations between the players. Furthermore, given the

shortage economy -- shortages of materials, their poor quality, the break down of

machinery, and so forth all induced by central administration of the economy the games

at work aim to cope with those shortages, flagrantly violating the ideological claim about

the efficiency of state socialism. Moreover, this adaptation to shortages required far more

autonomy than the bureaucratic apparatus regulating production would allow. Work

games were transposed into games directed at the system of planning, bringing the shop

floor into opposition to the production regime and the party state.

Far from social structure indelibly imprinting itself on the habitus of the worker

and thus assuring doxic submission, the state socialist regime systematically produces the

opposite, dissent rather than consent, even counter-hegemonic organization to despotic

controls. Indeed, state socialism generated a series of counter-socialisms from below


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the cooperative movement in Hungary, Solidarity in Poland and the civics in perestroika

Russia. From the beginning state socialism was a far more unstable order, not because its

socializing agencies were weaker far from it but because of contradictions generated

by the institutions themselves. State socialism was held together by a precarious

hegemony, that was always in danger of slipping back into a despotism that relied on

secret police, tanks, prisons, and show trials. In other words, where advanced capitalism

organized the simultaneous mystification of exploitation and consent to domination, so

now we see how the hegemony of state socialism the attempt to present the interests of

the party state as the interests of all is a fragile edifice that was always threatened by

the transparency of exploitation.

The symbolic violence and the accompanying misrecognition that Bourdieu

simply takes for granted cannot explain the instability and ultimate collapse of state

socialism. Within Bourdieus framework there is no reason to believe that symbolic

violence and misrecognition were any shallower in state socialism than advanced

capitalism. Quite the contrary the coordination among fields economic, educational,

political and cultural -- should have led to a far more coherent and submissive habitus

than under capitalism where such fields would have far greater autonomy. An analysis of

the logic of institutions and their immediate effects on individual and on collective

experience goes much further in explaining the fragility of state socialist hegemony.

This returns us to Bourdieus notion of social change, which depends upon the

gap between social structure and habitus, between possibilities and expectations. This


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hardly amounts to a theory since we do not know whether, when this gap between habitus

and field is created nor how it impels people toward rebellion and social movement rather

than accommodation and passivity. As we raised in the previous lecture, the question is

whether the gap between habitus and field is the result of a sort of psychic lag the

clash between habitus shaped in one field and the logic of a different field or whether it

is produced by any given field itself. In the case of state socialism I argued that the

regime itself produced the discordance between expectations and opportunities. It

propagated ideals it could not realize. This was not only true for workers on the shop

floor but it was also true of the dominant class. As the gap between ideology and reality

widens, and as attempts to reduce the gap violates the ideology (as in market reforms), so

the ruling class, riddled with contradictions, loses confidence in its capacity to rule, and

as a result the enactment of socialist ideology is ritualized. Without capacity or belief the

dominant classs hegemony collapses. Again there is no need to resort to the existence of

a deep-seated habitus that resists change.

Methodologically, there were corresponding differences in my approach to

capitalist and socialist production which reflected something deeper the presence or

absence of good sense. In Chicago I broke with common sense of workers to create

social theory based on the idea of an underlying objective truth. I created an

epistemological break between the logic of practice of the workplace and the logic of

theory of the academy. I made no attempt to elaborate some good sense in my fellow

workers but instead provoked them into an elaboration of their practical sense, by

asking them why they worked so hard, something they invariably denied! This was the


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first Bourdieuian reversal, from the subjective truth of making out to the objective truth

of exploitation. But it is not sufficient to remain at the level of the objective truth, it is

necessary to explain how it is that agents (workers) continue to reproduce the conditions

of that objective truth, the possibility of exploitation, and without the agents knowing that

was what they are doing! So the second reversal was to return from the objective to the

subjective truth, namely how making out contributed to both the securing and the

obscuring of surplus.

I was following the rules of Bourdieusian methodology, but not because I had

read Bourdieu, but rather because I did not believe that workers understood the

conditions of their own subjugation. But, was it because I was an academic with

interests in the superiority of my own scientific knowledge -- that I didnt find good sense

within the common sense of workers, or was there really no good sense, and that workers

truly did not understand the nature of their subjugation? My field work in Hungarian

factories suggests that it was the latter not the former for there, still an academic, I did

indeed find good sense within the common sense. In Hungary I made no fundamental

break with common sense. I took the workers immanent critique of state socialism to be

the good sense, elaborating that good sense in dialogue with my fellow operators,

contextualizing it in terms of the political economy of state socialism. Here in Hungary

Bourdieus strict opposition of science and common sense was replaced by Gramscis

account of the dual consciousness.

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of

his practical activity, which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so far as it transforms

it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might


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say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is

implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical

transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited

from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is not without consequences. It

holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of the will,

with varying efficacity but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the

contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice, and

produces a condition of moral and political passivity. Critical understanding of self takes place

therefore through a struggle of political hegemonies and of opposing directions, first in the

ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at working out at a higher level of

ones own conception of reality.

I was riveted to the consciousness of my fellow workers implicit in their activity and

which united them in the practical transformation of the real world, paying less

attention to the superficially explicit or verbal inherited from the past and

uncritically absorbed, which included racist, sexist, religious and localist sentiments.

Yet, it is true these verbal expressions formed powerful bonds among workers, often

overwhelming the incipient class consciousness.

Together with my collaborator, Jnos Lukcs, we focused on the capacity and

necessity of workers to organize production in the face of shortages. We defended that

practice to management who wanted to impose bureaucratic controls over production.

Infuriated by our claims they insisted that we redo our study. This was not just a struggle

within the consciousness of workers but between workers and management, and once

again it would be the explicit and verbal consciousness perpetrated by management that

ultimately prevailed. By the time Hungarian socialism entered its final years, workers had


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lost any confidence in the very idea of socialism, and had no imagination of an alternative

democratic socialism, even though it had been implicit in the logic of their own practice.

Inspired by the good sense of workers, what he saw as a great potential for some sort of

worker-owned enterprises, Lukcs tried to work with labor collectives to create the

foundations of an alternative to capitalism but this withered on the vine as capitalist

ideology gained the upper hand.

In short, the analysis of state socialism -- how it generated dissent and ultimately

collapsed -- does not require a theory of deep-seated habitus but focuses on its social

relations of production. It could not sustain a fragile hegemony and the attempts to do so

only hastened its demise. By the same token, as we saw earlier, the reproduction of

durable domination under capitalism does not require the inculcation of social structure.

Such submission that exists can be explained by the configuration of institutions that

elicit consent to domination based on the mystification of exploitation. This being the

case, is there no place for Bourdieus idea of unconscious habitus?

Take IV: The Generative Dimension of Habitus

My focus on the incipient class consciousness was driven by an interest in the

past, in the sources of the Solidarity Movement -- why a working class revolution might

take place in state socialism. It led me to erroneously discern the possibilities of a

democratic socialism to emerge with the collapse of state socialism, overestimating the

strength of the incipient working class consciousness. Working class opposition to state

socialism there was but it led, at best, to a weak demand for democratic socialism. The


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notion of habitus, bodily inscribed social structure, does not help understand these macro

transformations, whereas a focus on the dynamics and contradictions of the state socialist

regime does.

In the same way, understanding the transformation of advanced capitalism is not

aided by the ideal of the harmony/disharmony of habitus and field.Manufacturing

Consentwas focused on explaining the rise of the hegemonic regime. However, as in the

case of Hungary, here too I missed the fragility of the hegemonic regime because I did

not sufficiently appreciate how it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In constituting

workers as individuals with interests tied to management, the internal labor market and

the internal state had undermined the organizational capacity of the working class with

the result that the hegemonic regime I described inManufacturing Consenteasily

succumbed to the (unanticipated) twin offensives of global markets and the US state over

the last 30 years. Again the focus on habitus gets us nowhere in the explanation of social

change.

If the idea of hegemony is more useful than symbolic domination in explaining

the breakdown of a social order, is this because social institutions preempt the power of

the habitus to dictate practice or is it because there is no such thing as habitus and that

there are no cumulative sedimentations in the human psyche from previous fields. When

we turn from the break-down of an old order to the creation of new orders I think the idea

of habitus and its generative capacity to innovate and improvise comes into its own. Im


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thinking here of my research into the destruction of the Soviet working class and its

response to the market forces unleashed in that process.

Research I conducted through the decade of the 1990s into working class families

in Northern Russia point to the amazing adaptability of women and the inflexibility of

men. The transition to a market economy was propelled by the destruction of the state

administered economy that led to the market taking over the functions of distribution and

exchange. The sphere of trade, finance, speculation and banking became the most

dynamic sphere in the transitional economy but with the result that resources flowed out

of production and into exchange a process I called economic involution. It led to the

increasing reliance of workers on the family as a unit of production as well as

reproduction. Within this context it was women who proved the most resilient in

adapting to the new economic circumstances, establishing their own networks of

production, organizing an informal economy based on friends and kin, working not just

two but sometimes three shifts. At the same time men were often more parasitical than

productive in this new domestic economy, manifested in their demoralization, increased

drinking and lowered life expectancy.

An argument could be made that under state socialism working class men had a

clearly defined and singular role as breadwinner, whereas women had to juggle two

shifts, one at home and one at work. The result was a rather rigid mono-dimensional

habitus for men and a flexible, multi-dimensional habitus for women. Thus, women were

more responsive and creative under the exigencies of economic involution that they faced


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in the post-Soviet era. If this argument is correct then we might say that habitus becomes

important when social situations are less structured in times of institution building rather

than institutional collapse.

The Logic of Practice: Beyond Gramsci and Bourdieu

We can summarize the argument of this lecture by referring back to the notion of

false consciousness. For Gramsci the problem with false consciousness lies not with

consciousness but with the idea of falseness. That is to say, Gramsci believed that

workers actively, deliberately and consciously collaborate in the reproduction of

capitalism, they consent to a domination defined as hegemony. They understood what

they were doing, they simply have difficulty appreciating that there could be anything

beyond capitalism. Domination was not mystified but naturalized, eternalized. Yet, by

virtue of their position in production, workers did possess a critical perspective on

capitalism and an embryonic sense of an alternative, an alternative that could be jointly

elaborated in dialogue with intellectuals.

If for Gramsci the problem was the falseness of false consciousness, for

Bourdieu the problem was the opposite. It lies with the notion of consciousness which is

far too shallow to grasp the meaning of symbolic violence -- domination that lodges itself

deeply in the unconscious through the accumulated sedimentations of social structure.

For Bourdieu consent is far too thin a notion to express submission to domination and

instead he develops the idea of misrecognition that is deeply embedded in the habitus.

Because the dominated internalize the social structure in which they are embedded they


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do not recognize it as such. Only the dominators, and in particular intellectuals, can

distance themselves from, and thus objectivize their relation to social structure. Only they

can have access to its secrets. Not all intellectuals, to be sure. Only those can understand

domination, who are reflexive about their luxurious place in the world and who use that

reflexivity to examine the lives of others.

In adjudicating between these positions I have argued that both are problematic.

Gramscis notion of hegemony does not recognize the mystification of exploitation upon

which consent to domination rests. Falseness does characterize the consciousness of

workers, but this falseness emanates from the social structure itself, which is where I

depart from Bourdieu. Insofar as we participate in capitalist relations of production, we

all experience the obscuring of surplus labor, independent of our habitus. Whereas

mystification is a product of social structure itself and is not so deeply implanted within

the individual that it cannot be undone, Bourdieus misrecognition comes from within the

individual, from the harmonization of habitus and field.

Accordingly, Bourdieu cannot explain why symbolic domination is so effective in

some societies but not in others. Thus, why does state socialism, where one would have

expected submission to be most deeply embedded, systematically produce dissent? Put in

other terms, Bourdieu can explain the durability of domination but not its transformation.

Thus, how does Bourdieu explain the social transformations that take place in capitalism,

such as the transitions in the US production regime, from despotism to hegemony and

then from hegemony to hegemonic despotism? His theory of social change is contingent


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on the mismatch of habitus and field, but there is no theorization of how that mismatch is

produced, especially whether it is produced situationally or processually. Nor is there a

theorization of the consequences of that mismatch, whether it produces accommodation

or rebellion.

Far more than Bourdieu, Gramsci is concerned with social transformation. He

sees it as the breakdown of hegemony and the creation of a new subaltern hegemony,

whether this comes through organic crises (balance of class forces), or through the war of

position mounted from below on the basis of the kernel of good sense. What my research

suggests is that there is more to hegemony that the concrete coordination of interests or

the ties linking state and civil society. There are non-hegemonic foundations of

hegemony, namely the mystification of exploitation, which is why hegemony is so

effective in advanced capitalism and was so fragile in state socialism.

Because exploitation was so transparent in state socialism it gave far more scope

for intellectuals to engage with workers in the elaboration of alternative hegemonies

from below the Hungarian worker councils in 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, the

Polish Solidarity Movement of 1980-1981, the market socialism of Hungarys reform

period of the 1980s, the effervescence of civil society under Soviet Perestroika. These

counter-hegemonies were formed by different configurations of intellectuals and workers.

They were eventually swept away but they did provide the foundations of alternative

socialist social orders.


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Finally, this is not to deny the existence of habitus. Dispositions are inherited

from one situation to the next. Rather they are not so fully determinative, so totalizing as

Bourdieu claims, but rather they are pushed into the background by the dull, repetitive

and relentless power of social relations into which the dominated and the dominant enter.

When these lose their strength and coherence then habitus takes over as we saw in the

post-Soviet disintegration and involution. Habitus plays a secondary role in the

reproduction of domination but can play a primary role in the creation of new social

orders.

We live in depressing times of capitalist entrenchment when the failure of

actually-existing-socialism buttresses dominant ideologies. We should not compound the

forcefulness and eternalization of the presence by subscribing to unsubstantiated claims

about the deep internalization of social structure, reminiscent of the functionalism of the

1950s and its oversocialized man. Remember, those theories were overthrown by a

critical collective effervescence structural functionalism did not but also could not

anticipate.

March 28, 2008

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